Episode 102 - Datu Tim Hartman
Datu Tim Hartman - Episode 102
Martial arts develops character. Martial sports reveals character.
Datu Tim Hartman
Welcome to episode 102 of Martial Arts Radio, where today we get to hear from Datu Tim Hartman. Datu Hartman is a living legend in the world of Filipino martial arts and has offered numerous seminars across the globe. As a lifelong practitioner of Filipino arts, Datu Hartman has watched the growth of the various disciplines, including arnis, escrima, kali and the various approaches and styles to these arts. We hear about the man's past, what keeps him inspired to train and why he's still so passionate not only about martial arts, but about passing on what he's learned to newer students.
whistlekick sweatshirts
Today's featured whistlekick product line is our sweatshirts. They're available in zip-up, in quite a few colors and sizes. What do they have in common? Style, comfort and quality, just like everything we make.
Tim Hartman
Movies / TV - The Karate Kid, Kung Fu (TV), Weapons of Death, Enter the DragonActors - Bruce Lee, Donnie Yen, Michelle Yeoh, Cynthia Rothrock, Chow Yun FatBook - The Art of War
If you'd like to learn more about Datu Tim Hartman, you can visit his websites - datuhartman.com, wmarnis.com & horizonma.com. Datu Hartman is president of the World Modern Arnis Alliance. You can reach him on social media via Facebook, Twitter, YouTube & Instagram. You can also find the World Modern Arnis Alliance on Facebook.
On today's episode we referenced our interview with Master Ken / Mr. Matt Page.
During the episode we referenced Stickfighting World. You can see their promotional video below.
Show Transcript
You can read the transcript below or download here.Jeremy Lesniak:Hello, everyone! it's episode 102 of whistlekick martial arts radio. The only place to hear the best stories from the best martial artists like today's guest, Datu Tim Hartman. At whistlekick, we make the world’s best sparring gear and here on martial arts radio, we bring you the best martial arts podcast. I'd like to personally welcome you. My name is Jeremy Lesniak. I'm whistlekick’s founder and very fortunate to be your host here in martial arts radio. Thank you to the returning listeners and hello and welcome to those of you listening for the very first time. If you're new to the show or you're not familiar with what we make, please check out our sweatshirts. We have some lightweight zip-up ones and some heavier pullovers. Colorful, durable and they look good. Check them out at whistlekick.com. If you're interested in our sparring gear, which is the heart of what we offer, you can find that there too or at amazon.com. If you want the show notes, including links and photos, you can find those at whistlekickmartialartsradio.com. If you're not on the newsletter list, now’s a great time. We offer exclusive content to subscribers and it's the only place to find out about upcoming guests for the show. We only email a few times a month, we will never ever, ever, ever sell or give away your information and sometimes we mail out a pretty good coupon. So, here on episode 102, we hear from a lifelong practitioner of Filipino Martial Arts, Datu Tim Hartman. Datu Hartman is a legend in the world of FMA as the collective styles are sometimes referred to. He’s a lifelong practitioner of Filipino Martial Arts and he’s watched the growth of the various disciplines including Arnis, Eskrima, Kali and the various approaches and styles to these arts. We hear about the man’s past, what keeps him inspired to train and why he’s still so passionate, not only about martial arts in general but about passing on what he’s learned to newer students. Let’s welcome him to the show. Datu Hartman, welcome to whistlekick martial arts radio.Tim Hartman:Thank you!Jeremy Lesniak:It's a pleasure to have you here and I appreciate your time and looking forward to learning more about you as I'm sure all of the listeners will be as well. So, let’s start the way we always start. The best way to start, how did you get started in the martial arts?Tim Hartman:It was an interesting thing. When I was 2, I used to watch Kung Fu, the series, with my father, the original series and I used to go around the neighborhood playing martial arts or otherwise known as beating up all the other 2-year olds. Obviously, that didn’t go over too well and then, after that correction in attitude, of course, what does a 2-year old know? It was in 1980, a bunch of my friends were doing martial arts so I was working out with them in their backyard so it was just a lot of backyard/basement type workouts throughout high school and then, when I was 19, which should be ’94, ’95, I decided it's time for me to get serious and there was a Karate school around the corner, I planned on going there, but I wanted to look around first and just as I was about to figure out that the school around the corner was the one for me, a friend of mine called me up and said hey, you got to check this place out and so, I hopped in. It was the Filipino Karate Academy and Day One I walked in, they put a stick in my hand, I fell in love.Jeremy Lesniak:That’s a little bit different than what I'm sure most of our listeners and certainly different from what I'm used to in a lot of systems. Weapons are not the first things that we start with, right? We start with empty-handed. Of course, we’ve had a couple Filipino Martial Arts practitioners on the show and they’ve talked to us about that difference a little bit so what was it like for you, stepping out there and I'm going to guess, being exposed to something a little bit different than what you would have expected? Most of us, even before we start a martial arts, we expect martial arts is going to be more about punching and kicking than weapons and here, they put a stick in your hand Day One. What was that like for you?Tim Hartman:I was in heaven because I had a huge weapon collection.Jeremy Lesniak:Okay, so you were a step ahead already.Tim Hartman:I was that guy. I had nun chucks, I had staffs, I had knives, all the way around the house and as far as my, so the art was Modern Arnis which the founder was the late Grandmaster Remy Presas and to my knowledge, he was a silent partner in this club and so, for me, it was just, I fell in love. As far as my openhand combatives, I had pretty much taught myself or worked out with my friends all my striking long before I ever hopped in so I wasn’t necessarily good at striking but I was efficient. I was the new kid in the neighborhood and I had to prove myself a lot so I've honed my skills or got some basic skills that way, protecting myself and then when, and all of my friends had openhand stuff, so when I finally got into this school and they threw a stick in my hand, I was giddy as a school girl. The issue or the thing that was different with what we do though was Modern Arnis was actually 50-50, openhand and weapon, so we would do the stick technique and then we would do an openhand interpretation of it so it was more of a prop to teach openhand combatives. So, I do more than one Filipino style and some of them, it's all weapon all the time but the nice thing about Professor Presas’s Arnis system was that it was meant to be done all different ways. Armed, using a weapon to execute maneuvers. Unarmed, your assailant has a weapon and you don’t and then, mano a mano, where neither of you do have a weapon so it's a complete system so I would say it's more 50-50 training the openhand combatives all the way up.Jeremy Lesniak:But I'm wondering, you're talking about the experience, the self-taught and self-developed experience of your openhand techniques, I'm wondering how it would’ve gone for you if you have stepped into a more traditional, I shouldn’t say more traditional, a more empty hand focused martial art school. Would you have had that same passion right away?Tim Hartman:Oh, I don’t think so. Well, I love martial arts, don’t get me wrong. So, people ask me what I do and what my hobbies are. Well, what I do is Filipino Martial Arts. What my hobbies are are other martial arts. I mean there's other things I do too but I mean, in my training, I have played with, I don’t want to say I studied because a lot of times, people misinterpret or choose to misinterpret or mislead people unintentionally or intentionally but I've attended a lot of different seminars and visit a lot of different schools just to try things, the martial buffet. I've done Jiu Jitsu, Ninjutsu, Taekwondo, all the forms of Karate, different forms of Filipino Martial Arts, Aikido, Kenpo. It came into town for a seminar and I had the time off, I’d try to see it so when I'm at a tournament, hey, you should stop by at my school sometimes. I was knocking on the door 2 to 3 days later. I was just fond. I want to do everything and as far as where I would have ended up if I had started in openhand program, I still probably would be doing stuff but I don’t think I would’ve found my niche per se. I think I’d be a lifer like I am now but I might be still searching or I probably would’ve found it but it would’ve been longer and then have another martial DNA blood in there and what I like is that when I'm around, out and about, doing martial arts and people start talking about what they’ve done, I haven't found many people that started in Filipino Martial Arts even a lot of the masters over here in the States and even some from the Philippines, a lot of them started in Karate or Taekwondo and then switched over. It's a different mindset. I move differently than a lot of people because of the fact that I'm not, I cross train out of Filipino Martial Arts, I don’t cross train in the Filipino Martial Arts. When you cross train, you're always going to have that martial DNA that I'm doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and I'm always doing something as a stick fighter. I'm always thinking where is the knife, where is the stick, how do I incorporate things? I do pretty good with my Jiu Jitsu but at the end of the day I'm still a Filipino martial artist and that will come out during that stuff.Jeremy Lesniak:That’s really an interesting thing to think about and it's not something I think we’ve talked about much, maybe not even at all, on this show. The idea that the first martial art that you start in will carry through and influence everything else that you do because of, as you’ve put it, as your martial art DNA. It's your first connection to that realm.Tim Hartman:Let’s go through the systems I do so I can work back and forth so I'm not ripping off things. So I started with Modern Arnis and I'm only going to talk about the things that I have certification in. So, I do Modern Arnis, I do Balintawak which has no certification in that but I was brought in by my teacher, the late Grandmaster Remy Presas to Manong Ted Buot who used to teach [00:11:155] in Cebu so we got the modern, the Balintawak, Kombatan, which is a derivative of Modern Arnis which is formed by Remy’s younger brother, Ernesto. I've done, I am certified in Dekiti-Tirsia under Nene Tortal. I'm actually pulling up my resume on my phone because I don’t remember it all.Jeremy Lesniak:It's that long that you have trouble with it. That is an impressive arsenal.Tim Hartman:No, too many sticks to the head. Okay, here we go. So, we do Modern Arnis and Kombatan, the Bacon Buot lineage of Balintawak. I do Dekiti-Tirsia, certified Dekiti-Tirsia. I am a 1stdegree black belt in Kuntaw with a W, a black belt in Sikaran, both Filipino open hand systems under Doctor Mananggi. I'm a master instructor of Bano stick fighting and I am working on my blue belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu so I've got a few stripes towards that. I've done other things and there's actually some systems I have trained, I don’t claim them anymore because I haven't logged in enough hours to maintain my training so now, as we’re getting back, we’re talking about how I do things. So, the kuntaw is an openhand Karate Kung Fu system from the Philippines so when I do that, I went up the ranks fairly fast. It was 3 years doing hourly private training monthly up in Toronto which is 2 hours from me so 2 hours of training but it's a 4-hour roundtrip while I graduated with another person for their black belts, I could do the art, I earned it but I would always tell anyone, if you want to look at the way the arts done, don’t look at me per se because I have other martial DNA hardwired into me and I can do it, I can pass the test but I'm not necessarily the best representative of that system.Jeremy Lesniak:Okay, that makes sense. Cool! So that gives us a lot of context for who you are and as you said, very few people started in Filipino Martial Arts they ended up going to it and just kind of a fun aside, the few people that I know ended up in Filipino Martial Arts, they were destined for it. It is the thing that resonates with them more than any other style and they're so incredibly passionate about it and it's an art that I've been interested in learning more about and enjoying having folks like yourself on so I can get more of an education about it and been dabbling when I have the opportunity just as you’ve been talking about what seminars and whatnot but as you’ve traveled around and everything, I'm sure you’ve acquired a great number of stories which is kind of the DNA of this show and I'm wondering if you might share with us one of the best martial arts stories.Tim Hartman:Oh, best martial art story. I'm trying to think, I mean, I've got a lot of stories but I don’t know how many are…that’s a rough question. There's a lot of things, a lot of different things, I can give you on off the bat, maybe another one will pop in later during the interview. It's funny and how small the world can be, how’s that? So, Professor Presas was the founder of Modern Arnis, was on the cover of Black Belt magazine more than once. Really, the guy in his era was probably the guy who done more for Filipino Martial Arts than anyone else. Was a goodwill ambassador for the Philippines with diplomatic papers. That helped get a lot of people involved including Guro Inosanto and so, he’s teaching in Germany, I'm with him, I'm helping teach along with a couple of Americans and we go out afterwards for food at this Chinese restaurant and all of a sudden, a guy walks in with a crew, Asian gentleman. I’m like okay, that sticks out, we’re in Germany. I look and I go I know who this guy is! I nod to him and as we go to the back, someone said we know that guy. Well, who are you talking about? Asian guy. Who is that? I start whipping off all the movies he’s been in or the movie he’s been in. I can't remember his name. It was Eric Lee and I said Weapons of Death, it was a really cool cult movie and so, that’s Eric Lee? Yeah, yeah, yeah! So, I go, let me go back and Professor said No, no, no. I would go up to him so he goes into the backroom and he disappears for 10 minutes and we’re like alright, I think it's time to send out a search party. Here comes Professor with Eric Lee and his crew. He goes this is Eric Lee and introduces everybody and I'm like yeah, I remember you from the movies and he goes yeah and the German host for him goes oh my goodness, I think that’s Remy Presas when they walk by us so it just kind of funny, he hung out for the rest of the weekend with us so it was kind of cool how 2 American citizens, by then Professor was a naturalized American citizen, both happen to be in Hamburg, Germany in the same restaurant at the same time. It was just kind of cool how the world just keep getting smaller and smaller and smaller.Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah, one of the things that a lot of the guests on this show talked about is that the martial arts, once you get to the point of travelling, of course, there are a ton of people that train in their schools and maybe go to some local events but once you start travelling around, doesn’t even have to be internationally but just regionally, the number of people you bump into and the number of degrees of separation, nowhere near 6 it might be 2. So, that’s a lot of fun. I love stories like that and I appreciate you sharing that.Tim Hartman:That’s probably a surprise because when someone asks me about stories, it's kind of hard just to, a lot of times my story’s relevant to what’s going on at the moment if it's a technique or tell me about this guy or tell me about when you're teaching in the Philippines or in Europe or feel like I can talk about different things like that. Stories on demand kind of which one to choose from.Jeremy Lesniak:No, I understand. As we kind of get going, if stories pop in your head, by all means, please share them with us. So, let’s go back and lets go down a hypothetical road. Let’s pretend that you never end up in some kind of formal martial arts training. You’ve got your collection of weapons around the house. You’ve got the openhand techniques that you’ve developed on your own through working with your friends and a bit of necessity but never really any formal training, what do you think your life would look like today?Tim Hartman:Boring. I probably would be getting myself in a lot more trouble. Martial arts has definitely been a calming influence. An avenue to release a lot of energy. I don’t know. I was going down in school. One of the things I was trying to do was going down to performing arts so I was a singer and an actor and we had a thing about getting more serious into that and I did a couple left turns here, there and everywhere and martial arts kept taking more and more of my time. I’ll probably have a 9 to 5 type job while I was doing this when I was doing high school, I went right into the work force and [00:20:01] for a little while and advanced auto parts. I used to train a lot of the managers coming in, how to use the computer systems and stuff so I was a shift manager so I’d probably be hired in that company. Nothing wrong, nothing I didn’t enjoy but I don’t think but the passion that I have for my martial arts.Jeremy Lesniak:And that was the word that came into mind as I listen to your description and I think, we’re not even terribly far into our conversation yet and one of the things that hit me as soon as we started talking even before we started recording was it's very clear that you are passionate about martial arts and just that little detour there, the passion fell out of your words. You strike me as someone who works hard and probably has a strong work ethic but it's clear that you would’ve been a very unfulfilled individual had you continued down that path and not focus on martial arts.Tim Hartman:Who knows where I would be? I had a lot of different hobbies that I really enjoyed. I just don’t know, it's hard, I can't think of life without it. I can't sit at my couch without having something in my hand so sometimes it's a training knife or a real knife, a stick or sword. I've had more than one occasion when in my life, threatened to hit me if I hit them with my stick as I'm practicing. I can't think of a day when I don’t do martial arts one way or another and when people say what do you do on vacation? I don’t go on vacation. I go on martial art trips because one, I can write the vacation off but I cannot, I don’t remember…okay so, a big part of my business is teaching seminars. I'm only home 15 weekends out of the year. Now, I'm home during the week. It's just the weekends. Weekday, I pack up. Friday, I leave, maybe Thursday. Do seminars Sunday and Monday, unload, wash laundry, repeat everything over again so when I'm in town, unless I've been sick, I can't think of a day that I haven't set foot in my school. I got to come here. I just cannot not be here. Yeah, maybe I’ll hit the bag a little. I make sure my computer is in the school so I make sure I get up and move as opposed to having an office at home like I used to and some days, it was late in the afternoon that I hadn’t done anything. Get out of bed, throw the bathrobe on…I've got one of my sick dogs with me so excuse me, the people who are listening. It's very hard for me not to come in the building and do something. It's very hard for me not to pick up a stick, not to throw a punch or a kick or a knee or an elbow, do some hand combination or visualize a wrist lock. I mean, I am addicted. If it was something else, they might have an intervention for me.Jeremy Lesniak:I feel like there's a t-shirt slogan there somewhere.Tim Hartman:There's got to be something going on. The intervention that I can take most of the people who might be trying to do much.Jeremy Lesniak:And that’s probably why there are martial arts intervention, right?Tim Hartman:There we go.Jeremy Lesniak:I think maybe we can reach out to Master Ken, it sounds like it will be a great episode of Enter the Dojo.Tim Hartman:Well, he did the ninjutsu intervention so you know. He’s a Kenpo guy too.Jeremy Lesniak:He is originally an Okinawan guy. We’ve had him on the show and in super fun example in how small the martial arts world is, we’re mid-episode and realize that we grew up 45 minutes from each other and know a ton of the same people.Tim Hartman:I used to help co-run, I was one of the co-founders of Martial Talk and I run FMA Talk. Martial Talk has changed hands but that was Bob [00:25:03] and myself are the two that started it off. Started it off with Arnis, then Kenpo-Karate then it just got bigger than both of us but he used to be on our forum. He hosted Kenpo talk forum which was another spinoff. Yeah, and he’s a funny guy. I’m telling you I can't keep a straight face.Jeremy Lesniak:It is incredible and even if you don’t listen to the entire interview, I would encourage all of the listeners to go back and I’ll link it in the show notes, whistlekickmartialartsradio.com, but I’ll link to that episode, I forgot what one it is.Tim Hartman:Is he in character or is he…Jeremy Lesniak:We did the first, and it took us a while to set this up, we did the first, I want to say 10 to 15 minutes in character, and I had a different microphone setup at that time that allowed me to mute it very easily and quietly and of that 15 minutes, I was probably muted 13 minutes because I was laughing hysterically and just to not break in and he did a phenomenal job.Tim Hartman:Oh yeah, he’s the best. I've seen footage from the Maya Shows and busting Bill Wallace’s chops face to face and…Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah, he’s a riot. Absolute riot. Alright, so let’s pull it back. It's pretty clear that your life would at least been boring if somehow you broken that destiny that was you ending up in, not just martial arts but Filipino Martial Arts and lets think about a low point, a tough time and how did your martial arts training help you move past that?Tim Hartman:It's given me an outlet. Something to focus on that can positively help me. I have lost a fair amount of my family over the years and through that time, this is something that I can do on my own, I don’t have to worry about playing well with others. I'm not going to get all Zen because I'm actually from a blue-collar town and the year that I grew up in were a little rough around the edges so I don’t get all philosophical to that extent. For me, it was just a nice positive outlet. I could come in, do some training on my own, get off a lot of energy and focus on things. When you lose a family member, it's rough and you don’t want to ignore but you don’t want to sit around and just dwell on that because no matter what you do…I'm a little cold when it comes to people passing because of how many in my family had passed on over the years but at the end of the day, there's nothing I can do about it. It happened. We learn from the lessons of how they lived and how they passed on and sometimes, when they pass on, it's a good-bad thing and I just need to focus on to something and martial arts has always been there for me. I can do something else. It's like getting knocked on your butt when sparring. Doesn’t matter how many times you're knocked down, it's about how many times you get up. You do that over and over again and sometimes, we’ve gotten way too PC. It's time for everyone to man and woman up. Brush themselves off and get on with their life and martial arts has been a good venue for me to do that.Jeremy Lesniak:I would agree wholeheartedly. We’re going to live that there.Tim Hartman:Can of worms.Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah, that’s a can of worms that you and I would be good to go on but, of course…Tim Hartman:I'm kind of becoming the Denis Leary of the martial arts world. Similar to Master Ken but a little different. Recently, there's been life annoys me like I'm sad, I'm depressed and it's not because I'm, I think we’re all over-diagnosed, over-medicated but I see what’s happening in the world and it makes me sad. I'm depressed. I grew up in an era that seemed to be much nicer and much happier and I'm depressed as in this makes me sad, not depressed as in I need to be medicated. I've realized that I have to start saying what I mean, which I always have, but sometimes, I'm mixing words. That doesn’t mean we have to be mean when we do this but sometimes, we have to get in someone’s face and call it the way you see it a little more abruptly because sometimes people can't read between the lines. Whether you like Donald Trump or not, you know what he’s thinking. There's no mixed message when he says something to someone and I don’t get involved with politics and I'm not going to obviously, we don’t want this show to get that way but I think, the one thing I like about Donald Trump is that he’s not afraid to speak his mind. Now, of course, he’s got more money than anyone else out there so he can afford to do whatever he wants but still, nonetheless, I think too many people out there are afraid to say things and it just cooperate to see it. I was talking to someone the other day about some stuff that’s going on in the martial art world and I'm saying I'm trying to get some information on this person and they said that I was talking to this guy and I was told that he said something and I called him up about it. No, no, there must be some misunderstanding or the other person’s lying. Well, you can say that, I go, I just did. I'm not trying to call him a liar, maybe the guy is lying, maybe he isn’t, I don’t know. I'm trying to get to the bottom of things and otherwise, people always say well, there could be some kind of miscommunication, yadda, yadda, it's like no, let’s call what we think it is and if we’re wrong, we’ll apologize for being wrong later. I said we don’t have to be nasty but we can be honest.Jeremy Lesniak:Right. One of the life lessons, rules, I guess, that I've come to, over the last year or so, has been I don’t say anything about anyone that I wouldn’t say if they weren’t in the room.Tim Hartman:And as I tell people things, they go why would you tell this person? They may tell someone else and I'm like exactly. I'm not telling anyone that I wouldn’t want out there.Jeremy Lesniak:Right and some of us certainly have a wider amount that we’re willing to say to others but there's a lot of integrity in that, in being willing to speak your mind and it's something that I hope listeners are willing to consider. Maybe not a direct martial arts lesson but certainly something that, I think, those of us that have been training can appreciate the importance of it.Tim Hartman:Yeah, there's only one way to keep a secret and that’s tell no one so every time I talk to someone, I go with the mentality that whatever I said is going to get out there so make sure that whatever you say, is not going to embarrass you. You can be direct and still be pleasant about things. You don’t have to be cruel. You can sit there and say hey, I don’t know about this. Can you tell me about X, Y and Z? I don’t like this but that doesn’t mean you can't change my mind and I think this, that matter but guess what, you have a valid point as well.Jeremy Lesniak:Right. Honesty and respect are separate and can go together. So, let’s talk about some of your influences. You’ve mentioned a few names and certainly, we get a sense of who’s important to you with your Filipino Martial Arts lineage but if we were to take a couple of those out, the really core people that “raised” you. Who would you say has been the most influential person in your upbringing?Tim Hartman:So we’re not talking about my direct instructors?Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah.Tim Hartman:Okay. I would say the person that, there's a couple people. I’ll say Hiroki Kimura. He owned SNP Budo Martial Arts Supplies. He taught, he’s teaching Goshin Kenpō. He was here in the Buffalo area. He had the first real martial arts supply company in the area. There was only 2 really. It was him and this other place, [00:34:45] so I would visit him after work. I had left my instructor, initial instructor, John Bryant was my first Arnis instructor. He was getting out of town, changing the life. Some things happen in the club, I just decided that I just did my own thing and I left and Grandmaster Presas called me up and said if you want to continue, I’ll take you on as a private student which I thought was great. Well, the problem is I didn’t have a day to day instructor so I would see Remy then I would train all on my own so Mr. Kimura, which I visit probably twice a week, he was right down the road from work. We would talk about things and martial arts and he actually helped me develop my martial moral compass. He’s actually teaching in my school now. Shut down the business a couple years ago, wanted to slow things down and he’s here two nights a week. We talk about this all the time. He’s like I don’t recall that and I go Kimura-san, how many times do I come visit you? Oh, at least twice a week and how long do we talk? At least, an hour or two and I was learning from you the whole time. Every time he talks to me and we talk about stories and all these other stuff, I listened and I took them to heart and he was very instrumental. I would say a group of people who helped out were the Parker Kenpo people and what happened is I always heard rumors that Filipinos in Hawaii used to use Kenpo as a vehicle to teach their martial arts so there's a Kenpo guy, he’s not locally, he was teaching in my school for quite a while. He said you got to check these seminars out, they're pretty good times so I went down to Philly and I met all these people. It was hosted by a Mike [00:37:02] but then I got to meet Paul [00:37:09] Palanes, Lee Wedlake, [00:37:15] the list just kept, Bob White and the list just keeps going and going and going and including Ed Parker Jr., and I talked to Edmond a lot and it was his father who passed that gave me some, he actually did diplomas for our organization and a couple portraits for us and spent a lot of time with [00:37:37] and these guys, when I would talk to them, they would tell me, they went through this with Mr. Parker, they went through all these and they would say hey, this, this and this is going to happen and I go, yep, that did, that did, that did, alright well now, this is going to happen next and they were right on the money exactly how things would go down so they helped me on a couple things. One of which is the wave after Professor passing and the other was developing a language, I mean, they had examples what they have in their systems because in Filipino Martial Arts, a lot of times it's just oh, do this, do that, do the other thing, yadda, yadda, yadda. Nothing had a name and maybe it's my German ancestry but I needed to have some structure there and they helped me view on how, using the Kenpo terminology in understanding it, it helped me learn how to develop my own terminology. Some of the terms cross over because I teach a lot of Kenpo people in events so I want to always be there with their terminology so I can relate but I would say the Kenpo people were very nice to me. They brought me in this family and they were very good mentors on how to deal with what happens when your teacher passes on and when your teacher was the head of the system so it would be Hiroki Kimura and all my martial arts brothers and sisters in the Kenpo world helped out.Jeremy Lesniak:Great. Yeah, some good stuff coming out of that world, both of those worlds, absolutely and got a good sense for the reverence for the first gentleman that you mentioned named, I didn’t jot his name, I apologize.Tim Hartman:Hiroki Kimura.Jeremy Lesniak:Hiroki Kimura, yeah, I could really sense the respect that you had for him as you start talking about him. Let’s talk about competition. Has that ever been a thread to your career?Tim Hartman:Oh yeah, oh yeah! We’re not really doing much at the moment but I and my students, we have a team Datu’s Tribe so my title is Datu, that’s a tribal leader. So, when we’re coming up with the name of the team, well, I'm the datu, you're the tribe how about we go with Datu’s Tribe? And everyone thought, actually, some of the teams on the circuit were upset because that’s really the coolest name I've ever heard because it's accurate. Then, of course, when Survivor’s on, well yeah, we have Tribal Council. I always have immunity so they all chuckle at that but we’ve competed, I've hosted events, we’ve competed in events. We’ve done a lot of the open martial arts stuff so we’re doing sport Karate. We’ve developed, I've developed champions in here, local, regional, national, international champions. I myself have got, won 3 world titles. My students are better than me now. I want to come to that. I've done more of the focusing on the coaching aspect. Two of my guys have done the cage stick fighting so think MMA fighting with rattan sticks so we’ve got 2 champions through SFW which is stick fighting world. I think it’s…competition is good at times and then, there are those other times. I think martial arts develops character. Martial sports reveal character and it's interesting to see how some people are in that sport world and people I thought were really good people turn out to be very big jerks and some people I thought were idiots turned out to be really nice guys, really very sportsman-like and stuff. It's an eye-opening experience. There’s martial art, there's martial sport, there's martial combat so our material can be used in all three. Others are specifically for those areas and I guess, the thing is it depends on what you want your focal point to be. We do all of that in certain portions or proportions. Right now, we backed away from the sport. I doing a lot of seminars now so it's hard to maintain. Go pay to compete somewhere versus go and be paid to teach and after the recession, things definitely changed for a lot of people financially but yeah, we’ve done it. I said, I probably had 15 world titles come through our school but we’ve stripped a lot of that stuff down. Getting rid of all the trophies and medals hanging around the club. It's just clutter and people are just looking for good martial arts these days. People are looking for competition don’t want us to think that they want to do MMA and they go to the club and they realize that it's a great workout and then, they get one fight and they never fight again but they still come and train. I mean, that goes with everything. A lot of my students come in, let’s do a tournament! They do one, okay, I've had enough. Great! You get some people who just… I want to found tournaments in like house league stuff. It's just a good learning experience and there's just too many people out there that they get all obsessed about it like yeah, I understand. When you're spending all that money and you make sure that all the rules are followed and all these other stuff but at the end of the day, I know people who have spent easily $15,000 in a year competing. What does that get you? I mean, if you enjoy it, more power to you but it's not getting you anything major these days. I mean, I don’t know a lot of tournament champions that are getting movie deals or doing the seminar tour afterwards because at the end of the day, I don’t want the guy who was the champion. I watch the guy who coached them. I get all these advertisements for UFC champions to come visit my school and teach, I'm like no. Guest appearance, maybe but I want the guy who coached them. Most of the fighters, it's hard to find a fighter that knows how to teach because they're being coached to fight. They don’t have the experience. Obviously, they can't be good at it. It's just that’s not their primary thing.Jeremy Lesniak:Doing and teaching are two very different skill sets.Tim Hartman:Oh, huge, huge different skillsets and I was a very good doer and I had a knack for teaching but it took me a long time to hone the craft to get to where I am today and the problem, part of the problem was the system I do, Filipino Martial Arts. There's no instruction manual. There's no terminology. There's none of that stuff so I have to invent it all or develop it all for myself. I have to rethink is that the proper word. Rethink about it again. Now, let’s do it a little different here and go from there.Jeremy Lesniak:Okay, yeah, I agree with everything that you're saying. I think there's a lot of value in competition but I think that there comes a point where there's a diminishing rate of return on that value and that once you cross that threshold unless you're doing it for the love of doing it, you're probably not going to get a lot back.Tim Hartman:If my students like to go to a tournament, they like seeing the old man getting out there with them so I don’t mind being in the trenches with my people. The world championships for the World Sikaran which is a Filipino Foot fighting. It's like Taekwondo. Well, if you watch the art, it doesn’t look like Taekwondo. When you watch the sport application, it looks a lot like Taekwondo and the world gathering’s next year March 2017 for Grandmaster Geronimo’s birthday so they're doing the, this will be the 3rdworld tournament that goes with it and when I was up in Canada in Manitoba and they do other divisions so they do stick, knife, openhand kata, the whole nine yards so I actually won, I got gold in single stick sparring and knife sparring and obviously, it's a padded knife. Who’s going to insure the other one? I actually competed in those two divisions, in kata and in weapons forms, and I medaled in everything but I got 2 golds and I’d be defending my title if I go back. I'm going to the event. I'm just not sure if I'm planning on competing or not. I’ll be 52 at the time and all I got to say, when I competed, there was a lot, I don’t know if there was anyone that was below a 4thdegree black belt in my division. There had to be 15 people there so I was excited. I was like alright, this is the division that’s really the masters division, not just in age but in experience so it was really cool, really cool.Jeremy Lesniak:And granted that it's just anecdotal but at whistlekick, we set up a booth at quite a few martial arts events and over the last couple of years that we’ve been doing this, it seems like there's a little bit more experience creeping into the adult black belt divisions so that’s nice to see that, just as yourself, you’ve realized your students like to see what you can do. It gives them something to strive for and personally, I'm just seeing more of that. I hope it continues because it's what makes everyone better.Tim Hartman:Well, we got to lead by example so people can follow by choice.Jeremy Lesniak:I like that. I've heard that, of course we’ve heard the first half. I don’t know that I've heard the second half. That’s pretty poignant. So, let’s talk about things that maybe could’ve been. If you could train with anybody that you haven't, be they alive or dead, who would you want to work out with and why?Tim Hartman:That’s a really good question. I've been trying to think about that one when you sent me the list here and I have been very fortunate to train with a lot of people. Though the people I would be looking for probably, the late Edgar Sulite. He was an up and comer in the Filipino Martial Arts world. Grandmaster [00:49:41] didn’t get a chance to train with Larry Hartsell. Ted Lucaylucay would be another one. Most of them, they fall in the category of a Filipino Martial Art or the JKD with the Filipino concepts blended in with it but I don’t exclude others. I got to see some people but I didn’t get to train with them like [00:50:16] he’s pretty amazing but I learn more by watching on the sidelines than I would have on the mat because he’s very, I don’t want to say he’s stingy, he’s about focusing on making one technique as good as you can so it was time-consuming and you wouldn’t get a quantity as opposed to you wouldn’t get a quality material but unfortunately, I'm not a forms-driven system for most of my style so a lot of that wouldn’t necessarily directly translate to my day to day training but right off the top of my head, that would be those 3 names right there. Larry Hartsell, Teddy Lucaylucay, Edgar Sulite. Oh, one more, [00:51:13] GM [00:51:16] yeah, that would be probably it. You can probably whip off some names. My thing was I wanted to see everybody so I’ll give an example. I was in the first or second NATMA convention down in Clearwater, Florida. So I'm talking to people, what class you're doing next? Oh I'm going to do the retention class and I'm going to do the intro class. It's a business seminar weekend. Tim, what are you doing? I'm taking the class of Fumio Demura. Isn’t that the Karate guy? It's a Karate guy, yeah! You do Filipino Martial Arts? Yeah. What are you going for him? I don’t give a damn, it's Fumio Demura! And the magazine came out later and there's me sitting in the front row looking up at Fumio Demura as a little school kid looking oh, wow, because I know who Fumio Demura was and I'm just all in. I will go see anyone. Now, in all sincerity, the seminar was nothing. I didn’t enjoy it at all because it wasn’t applicable to what I'm doing but it was Fumio Demura and I had a blast because I got to train with Fumio Demura. The unofficial bucket list. I don’t have an official bucket list of people I want to work with. It's just anybody I get a chance to see, I want a piece of them.Jeremy Lesniak:That’s quite a list and it's a great list. I can certainly empathize with that idea that training with everyone. You kind of talked about that earlier on in our conversation that if somebody opened the door to you, you’d be there in 2 to 3 days and I'm the same way and I think a lot of our listeners are too. Passionate about the martial arts, not a martial art, singular.Tim Hartman:Actually, here’s the person I really want to train with and not for the reason everyone’s going to think it's going to be. It will be Bruce Lee. Now, I was a big Bruce Lee fan when I was a kid and I'm not saying I'm not a Bruce Lee fan but he didn’t even get a chance to get good. Can you imagine how good he would be today? I would love to see where he was back then, prior to this. Film, you couldn’t trust. Not to say that they edited it but the technology couldn’t capture his speed properly and he died in his 30s. Man, that’s a newborn in martial arts. That’s a baby in martial arts. In the martial arts world, I just turned 51 this year, I consider myself middle aged in the real world but I also consider myself, I might have hit adulthood now in the martial art world. It would be interesting where he would be now. I think he’d be doing a lot, he’d be doing movies the whole time. I don’t think Enter the Dragon was big because he passed. That movie stands the test of time but I would really love to see where he was in person, crossing hands because he was ahead of his time but without proper forms of grading, you don’t have anything to really tell you how, our perception of things are a lot different. When you watch old movies like I was watching old James Bond with Sean Connery and when I first saw it, I was like yeah, those are good fight scenes. Now, I'm like cringing left and right so I’d like to see what he looked like back then in person and also, to be able to judge how much martial arts evolved since then. Have we caught up to him? Have we surpassed him? I think we probably surpassed him as a whole, as a community. Not necessarily, as an individual. He was a Wayne Gretzky or a Michael Jordan of martial arts in that era. Where would they be today?Jeremy Lesniak:I agree and that’s a really interesting idea and what’s coming to mind for me is the fact that Bruce Lee was so cerebral in his approach and was constantly evolving things. We did an episode with someone who trained at the Oakland school that Bruce Lee started and we got to hear what it was like to have Bruce Lee phone in because he was doing so much travel, phone in and say, here’s an adjustment to the curriculum. Living through that Jeet Kune Do formation, really, and I don’t expect that that’s something that will ever get switched off, that mental component so I think you're right. Where would he have taken it if he lived and trained through 60, 70, 80 years old. So, lets lighten it up a little bit, go to some media question. Martial arts movies, we talked about Enter The Dragon, you mentioned Weapons of Death and your love for the movie, for the TV show rather, Kung Fu, do you have a favorite martial arts movie or did we just name?Tim Hartman:No, well, there's a couple. I think my whole comment about movies that stood the test of time, at least American-based movies, or movies with Americans in it would be Enter the Dragon and Karate Kid with Ralph Macchio. You look at the eras that they were filmed, their stuff still looks good technique-wise. I'm a big Karate Kid fan because of how much it did for us as an industry but honestly, my favorite movies if you have to be plural, I like Five Deadly Venoms, big fan of that. Love the Shaw Brothers. Kid with the Golden Arm. I'm trying to shave that one down. I haven't seen it in a while. That was the movies I used to watch on Kung Fu cinema when I was a kid. If we’re talking more current, I like the Ip Man series a lot. I haven't seen the last one with Tyson in it but the first two are amazing. It's rough because a lot of martial movies have fallen in the genre of action movies so it's hard. I like Fearless and Unleashed with Jet Li. I was a big fan of The Protector with Jackie Chan growing up, I mean, there's just a lot of good movies out there. It depends. A lot of the stuff, I’d say now, fallen with the crossover genre. I think it was Van Damme who really started those crossovers when he did Bloodsport and Kick Boxer were martial arts movies and then, once he did Universal Soldier with Dolph Lundgren, the two of them crossed over into action being action stars versus a martial artist so there's a lot of movies in that category. At that time, I enjoyed Above the Law with Seagal but a lot of these, I haven't watched lately so I don’t know if I’ll still enjoy them. Some of these things, anytime I put on Enter the Dragon, I always enjoy that. Karate Kid, I always enjoy it. Some of the movies, I look back on, I was a little afraid when Netflix had Five Deadly Venoms so I ordered my copy of it, got it in, okay, I was happy. Obviously, the storyline could’ve been better but I was watching it for the martial arts. My friend moved to Thailand for a while teaching and he sends me the video, I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie Chocolate?Jeremy Lesniak:I haven't.Tim Hartman:The autistic girl who loves chocolate, learns martial arts and dreams someone like that.Jeremy Lesniak:Somebody was talking about that in the show recently, I don’t even know if that episode’s come out yet, yeah.Tim Hartman:And he gave me the app thing, I watched it, I couldn’t watch it. 10 minutes, I had to shut it off like Eric, what are you doing to me here? Well, the fight scenes are amazing! You’ve been in Thailand way too long, my friend. Maybe the fight scenes were cool but I couldn’t get past the acting. My taste has matured over the years.Jeremy Lesniak:You know it's interesting as you were talking about Enter the Dragon and Karate Kid and some of these others and you phrased standing the test of time, the thing that I'm noticing as a common thread is the caliber of the martial artists that were involved on the back end and we’ve talked about the Karate Kid and the involvement of Fumio Demura behind the scenes on that movie, I don’t know if you're aware of that.Tim Hartman:Oh, I didn’t know. He stood in for Miyagi, right?Jeremy Lesniak:He did stunt stuff and he did choreography and in fact, Pat Morita spent so much time with Fumio Demura that effectively, the character of Miyagi was based on Fumio Demura, the person which has led to the documentary on Fumio Demura called The Real Miyagi and all these other stuff but some of these other movies you mentioned, Ip Man. Donnie Yen is as legitimate as a martial artist and a tremendous martial artist, really, as you can find so I think that that’s kind of the common thread. To use the quote on realism, real recognizes real. As martial artists, we recognize the legitimate martial artist regardless of plot, of someone maybe the hokey things, we hone in on that and that can carry things through. the plot to the Karate Kid is pretty simple and maybe is one that resonates but the acting isn’t anything exceptional. The cinematography isn’t anything that wouldn’t have won any awards for but it's a real martial arts movie that martial artists can relate to.Tim Hartman:It's a shame when people like Donnie Yen who get thrown in an American movie, Blade 2, underutilized because he’s so talented and then, now, I guess he’s going to be in the next Star Wars movie. I'm not sure if it's Rogue One or the next episode.Jeremy Lesniak:No, it's Rogue One is what he's set for and there have been a couple trailers that have come out and really, not shown much of him.Tim Hartman:They just use him to capture the Chinese market which is terrible. If you're going to put someone in there of that caliber, utilize him. Just don’t put him in there as the token guy, the token actor to attract a certain clientele.Jeremy Lesniak:We’ll see what happens. My hope is the same of a lot of martial artists of my generation that we get to see Donnie Yen wielding lightsabers.Tim Hartman:That’d be really cool. I just hope that they do a lot better than they did in Blade 2.Jeremy Lesniak:I think it would be hard to do worse than what they did with him in Blade 2. So, how about actors, if I had to pin you down for a favorite actor?Tim Hartman:Michelle Yeoh is my favorite female actress. There's a couple for martial artists. There's a couple girls coming up but she’s my favorite. I'm friends with, do I have to mention it, and I like her too. Cynthia Rothrock, we’re at a lot of events at the same time. I like Cynthia. I don’t think she, I think she was underutilized. At the end of the day, you're at the whim of the scripts that come to you and I don’t think she was given the chance to really shine like she should. So those are my favorite females. Males, I think it's Donnie Yen. I'm really beginning to like him more. The top pack is always Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Donnie Yen, Sammo Hung and, oh what’s his name? Chow Yun Fat. I don’t know if it's the actor or the character that I'm more with. I love Chow Yun Fat in Bulletproof Monk. I thought he was amazing. I like him in The Replacement Killers. That was good too but that was more action and he was great with Wahlberg in The Corruptor so I like him a lot. Jet Li doesn’t show, his characters’ pretty predictable. He’s had a diversity thing but I think for acting, the craft is Fat is the guy for me as an actor. Martial art-wise, they’ve all had different things. I mean, I love Jackie Chan, I wish they’d given him a lot of serious stuff. He’s always the comedic, I mean, he’s a funny guy to begin with but I’d like to see him with something a little more serious. He’s so boxed in now.Jeremy Lesniak:He’s got some stuff early and middle of his career as he was starting to break out in Hongkong before he was even a household name here in the States that has a lot more serious stuff. We did a whole profile episode on him and talked a little bit about some of those earlier roles and of course, his role in the newer Karate Kid movie, the 2010 version.Tim Hartman:He was amazing in that. Yeah, that was actually, that was a nice blood. He really took, I know everyone is going, oh, it should’ve been the Kung Fu kid. It was the Karate Kid. It's the same script, they just moved the drill. I felt bad for the movie because they tried to throw racism at it and oh, it's the Asians against the Blacks and I'm like no, you idiots! It's the new kid in town, get the story straight but I liked that a lot and even though, because you knew it was coming. The whole time you knew exactly how it's going to end but Jackie, I forgot, because I'm thinking of all these other movies, Jackie Chan did an amazing job in that movie.Jeremy Lesniak:I think his performance is horrendously underrated and I think part of it, you have to know him. You have to know what he usually does for it to stand out but that was my big takeaway from that film was how well he did. So, how about books? Are you at all a martial art book guy?Tim Hartman:I'm a collector but I'm dyslexic. I'm really bad at my dyslexia. I got this collection that’s highly underutilized but I'm looking at a bunch of them. There are a lot of Filipino Martial Arts. I've got a couple Kenpo books here. I've got a couple of Jeet Kune Do books but there's nothing that really jumps out at me. I'm dyslexic and it can really mess with my head when I'm trying to do stuff so, the Art of War is nice because you can always read shorter snippets of it. I don’t have to read the whole thing. Sometimes I'm a genius when I'm reading and writing and other times, I'm a caveman which is good because of the stick. I’m going to smash. Worked perfect with my art but I would probably say Art of War and my teacher’s books, all the Presas stuff with both Remy and Ernesto Presas. They’ve both have books out but I would just source it just for some minor stuff real quick like an encyclopedia. Just got to look at something, put it back in the shelf.Jeremy Lesniak:Alright, well, of course, we know why you train. It's your passion, it's your love for the arts but I'm wondering if you have any goals. Is there anything that you're working towards in the future?Tim Hartman:Yeah, yeah. Not retirement because I don’t plan on ever stopping but sooner or later, I'm going to stop. The batteries are going to run and I'm not going to be able to do what I'm doing for one reason or another so I run the World Modern Arnis Alliance. I was a senior students of the late Grandmaster Remy Presas. This is the primary thing. Everything I do is based around this and the other arts, it's like a Filipino Jeet Kune Do so it pulls from other systems. It's a very eclectic system. This is why I trained in the other arts to look at some of our bases. Now, my goal is to set up the future so the generation after us can still keep the art going so right now, I look at other Modern Arnis organizations and I don’t know if it will continue past their generation. Right now, I think that, if we’re talking about the U.S. based groups, we’re the ones that have the chance of having a generation or two after us. Right now, I'm the face of the art or the organization but I now have a whole world-class team that are doing their own seminars now. I've got guys that are doing 15 seminars, 20 seminars a year. One of my guys up in Canada, Craig Mason, will be doing the first apprenticeship camp that I'm not teaching at because the goal is to have these guys run things. My goal is not for my organization, when I pass on, the art, the system, the org or whatever, I really don’t care if people continue under the banner of the World Modern Arnis Alliance, what’s important to me is that the system continues forward. Having seen this time and time again with other systems and organizations, once the founder, the person who’s in charge at the moment is the glue. When Remy was alive, we were all there but he attracted a lot of people to his organization that may not get along with each other. Now, this isn’t a bad thing. There's some people you like and there's some people you don’t. Just like some people like pasta and other people like steak, that’s fine and then after Professor passed on, a bunch of us went in different directions, our own ways. There's nothing wrong with that. I don’t have an unrealistic goal about the World Modern Arnis Alliance moving forward past my retirement, forced or otherwise. My goal, and we’re doing pretty good right now, is that if something happens to me tomorrow, the art is going to continue with our lineage so that’s my goal with martial arts right now. We’re at the process of digitizing a lot of our material, having online libraries so people would be able to supplement their training but not substitute personal training. There's too many YouTube black belts out there so this is an online reference to help you out so as you're coming up the ranks, oh, I forgot what that form was, what’s that 3rdmove in the form? Oh, there it is, okay. How do you do this disarming? Oh that’s what I'm missing. I'm a visual guy so I need to see things, I need to feel things. Reading it in a book doesn’t do it for me and there's my young puppy, once again, barking at whatever going on around here but I need to see things and so, this goal is an online reference to help us and I don’t have any problems with online courses but there needs to be some physical interaction because some of these is about sensation. Where are you putting the pressure and you can't do that in a video so those are what we’re doing right now. Hopefully in the fall, we’ll have that up and running and the big thing right now is just preparing for my retirement. That’s probably 50 years down the road but nonetheless, I still have to have people set up to take the art. Right now, we’re working on having Canada become more self-sufficient. I'm right on the Canadian border. I want them to have me in because they have me there not because they feel like they have no choice. I said, I've got a good team up in Canada that’s doing well so right now, if I was just to say, alright, I'm done. I'm not going to Canada anymore. You guys need to take care of yourselves, they’d be in good hands.Jeremy Lesniak:Good. Good and I think it's great that you're thinking of these things long in advance. I think a lot of charismatic school system owners don’t give this idea much thought that they just kind of figure everything will fall into place when they pass, if they pass, when they pass. Everyone passes, right?Tim Hartman:Well, I don’t know, I'm not going to budge.Jeremy Lesniak:You haven't yet. I haven't yet. There's a chance. Everyone that’s alive today hasn’t died yet.Tim Hartman:There you go.Jeremy Lesniak:So maybe one of us will make it but all too often, I've seen and I'm going to guess you’ve seen it too where after the passing of an especially charismatic grandmaster, things just fall apart. The politics, the jockeying for position, the power struggle, people especially if there's money there and it just gets really messy and for you to set up things so they can work better, I think is really admirable and says a lot for the love of the arts and the art that you are administering.Tim Hartman:It happened with us. When Remy passed on, it was a train wreck. There are multiple organization but now, let’s look at the flipside of this. The first year he passed on, there's a 150-some odd seminars taught. That was more Modern Arnis seminars that have ever been taught while he was alive per year so I mean, there's definitely good things of this. When the head of system passes on, it's a defining moment of the system. Will it fade away to obscurity or will it flourish? A bunch of organizations popped up and I had had resigned from the main organization because I know a professor, I was with him when he got diagnosed with cancer and we talked about a bunch of things and he wanted to see me move forward with the art. I decided that the organization was going to hold me back so when he resigned due to his physical conditions, I resigned from the organization as well because I wasn’t a member of the International Modern Arnis Federation per se, I was a direct student of the late Grandmaster Remy Presas and so, I saw everything that happened. There's some pros to it, as well as cons. Now, with different people doing their own thing, they’d bring different things to the table and they can bring good things to the table and you might bring up a lot of innovation from different people because of different size, different strength, different backgrounds and I think it's a good thing in some ways. Obviously, there's some negativity out there. With that going on, I'm trying to minimize what happens with my people when it's time for me no longer to be teaching and I said the big thing is to make the community self-sufficient. We’ve gone from nothing when I left to the largest U.S.-based Modern Arnis organization to date. I'm proud of that and I feel confident that when it's time for me to stop teaching, there will be others in place to continue the art, not necessarily the organization.Jeremy Lesniak:So, if people want to learn more, if they want to learn more about the organization, the seminars or anything under your umbrella, where would they go for that information?Tim Hartman:Well, they could go to datuhartman.com, they can also go to wmarnis.com so if you look up Datu Hartman, if you google World Modern Arnis Alliance, you'll find the organization and then, if you're in the Metro Buffalo, New York Area, I run Horizon Martial Arts, horizonma.com. So these are the 3 ways to get ahold of me and if you can't get ahold of me, it's because you're not trying. We’ve had people, oh, I can never get ahold of Datu! That’s funny, every time I call him, he picks up the phone so I used to have my phone forwarded to my cell from obviously, if I'm out of the country, it's pretty hard but if you leave a voice message, I’ll get to it.Jeremy Lesniak:Sure, and I can attest it was not very hard to get a hold of you. Well, this has been great! Any parting words of wisdom for everyone listening?Tim Hartman:Hmm, so many things. Hmmm. Well. I think what we do is easy as martial artists. I think sometimes, it's not hard, we just make it complicated so what I would tell people is continue your training, try to look at the root of what you're doing. Try to figure out what the basic formula is and experiment. As long as it's safe for you and your training partner, don’t let it hold you back. Realize that the system is only good as the people doing it and just because someone else is doing something different doesn’t mean it's wrong. It's just a different taste. There is no one style better than another unless you train with me then we’re the best, and that was a joke just in case people didn’t get my full context sense of humor. I think those are probably the things I would tell people coming up. Train, train, train and don’t be afraid to experiment and try the martial buffet out there. Go visit seminars and stuff like that.Jeremy Lesniak:Thank you for listening to episode 102 of whistlekick martial arts radio and thank you. to Datu Harman. Over at whistlekickmartialartsradio.com, you can find links to Datu Hartman’s social media account, his school, association, some photos and a video from the Stick Fighting World Combat League we’ve discussed. If you like the show, be sure you're subscribing or using one of our free apps. They're available both iOS and Android. 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